Posts tagged Look
What Does Siri’s Future Look Like?
Jan 31st
It’s only been three months since Apple unveiled Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Although the product is technically in beta, it has already spawned imitations and Web video parodies. What is perhaps most exciting about Siri is not what it does now, but in its potential future uses.
The latest clues about that future come from a newly-published patent, which hints at some of the things Siri may be able to do after its first iteration.
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The patent focuses primarily on the “hands-free context” in which users could employ voice control. Whether in a moving vehicle, at home or in a professional setting, there are a number of scenarios in which users could benefit from controlling their devices using only their voices. This is especially true while one is driving, when voice could be used to send and receive messages or to query for navigational directions. Scenarios like that, or at least early versions of them, are already familiar to iPhone 4S owners, but are bound to get more functional and complex moving forward.
One thing Apple apparently plans to have its devices do is automatically detect those hands-free scenarios and adjust the UI accordingly. That is, when you mount your phone in the car, the device realizes it’s time to substitute certain core elements of its GUI with voice and audio-based controls.
The wording of the patent itself is not exclusive to smartphones. Indeed, it lists personal computers, tablets, televisions and gaming systems as devices with which this technology could potentially be used. There should be little doubt that the company plans on expanding Siri beyond the iPhone and building it into other hardware, quite possibly including the forthcoming new iPad and Apple’s much-anticipated HDTV set.
The Role of Siri-Hacking
Some of the more exciting clues about Siri’s future potential come not from patents but from the community of developers who have already started tinkering with what Apple released and putting it to new uses. Early examples built using the SiriProxy hack include remotely adjusting the thermostat and starting one’s car, as well as calling up television shows on a Web-connected set top box.
While Apple officially frowns upon such tinkering, it has a tendency to borrow heavily from the iOS jailbreaking community when developing its own products. It’s even hired a few notable iOS developers with roots in the jailbreaking community. Each new version of iOS pulls in a feature or two previously only available on jailbroken devices. The recently overhauled Notification Center is just one substantial example.
When users started hacking the Kinect, Microsoft famously endorsed the practice, going so far as to offer cash for the best hacks. If Apple embraces Siri-hacking, it will likely be in more subtle ways, probably by quietly rolling a few of the best hacks into its own official offering. The line will always be drawn at features that go too strongly against carrier wishes, present user experience challenges or otherwise don’t meet Apple’s strict requirements.
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5 Things You Should Look For in a Community Manager
Jan 23rd
In honor of Community Manager Day, I thought it would fun and worthwhile to share some tips with employers looking for the perfect community manager for their business.
The community manager role is more relevant now than ever, and the numbers show it. In a joint research report released by Booz and Co. and Buddy Media, titled Campaigns to Capabilities, brand marketers said that hiring full-time employees is the number one investment they are making in social media. Furthermore, 63% of all social media teams have dedicated community managers, and 59% of social media teams plan to hire full-time community managers in the near future.
So, if you are one of the many companies looking for a community manager, what are the qualities any candidate absolutely must have? Here are the top five things to look for in a community manager:
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Guest author Michael Jaindl is chief client officer for Buddy Media. He has over seven years managing and building technology products for the largest companies in the world. Prior to Buddy Media, MJ worked at NBC and GE.
1. A strong writing background, preferably in journalism or PR. There are a couple of reasons why this is so important. Though it may seem obvious, proper grammar and spelling errors are inexcusable for corporate social media accounts. Additionally, those with journalism and PR backgrounds have an understanding of what content is newsworthy and likely to be shared, as well as an ability to relay information in an engaging yet concise manner.
2. The ability to analyze and optimize (quickly). Creating content and responding to people is an integral part of the job, but community managers must be able to look at data to determine what is working and what is not. If certain types of content is resonating, whether it is due to the publishing schedule, substance or style, community managers should be able to effectively optimize accordingly. Conversely, if engagement is down, community managers must be able to move quickly in a new direction without hesitation.
3. A constant connection to the social world. Community managers cannot limit themselves to working a 9-5 day, Monday through Friday, because communities are real time and don’t care when you’re in the office. Community managers need to establish guidelines to have specific team members active on call around the clock., or as much as possible.
While there are times when communities might be less active, an important comment or questions from a fan published on Saturday morning simply cannot be left for Monday morning. Community managers need to commit to checking social networks in the evening and on weekends. The best community managers will embrace the opportunity to provide value to your brand outside normal work hours.
4. An insatiable appetite for your industry. Community managers need to be interested and passionate about more than just your company. Great community managers are tuned into the industry’s top news sources and thought leaders and are constantly looking for links, videos and news to provide to their communities. Community managers who are excited about the overall industry, and not just their own brand, can effectively communicate that passion to their fans and followers.
5. Short-term and long-term thinker. Community managers often think about the day-to-day of creating updates and responding to people online. Being able to work in the moment and quickly read and react to conversations online is a crucial part of the job.
But equally as important is the ability to look at the big picture and to work toward long-term goals and objectives. Effective community managers can think “big picture” in order to use community management as a way to reach business objectives. Whether the goal is to relieve pressure on customer service call centers or to reach certain engagement or web traffic benchmarks, the best community management candidates can put together long-term strategies and then work daily to reach those goals.
Photo by jynmeyer
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Top 10 Things to Look for in an SEO Expert – PCWorld
Jan 23rd
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Top 10 Things to Look for in an SEO Expert
PCWorld It may be time to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, whether it's as an employee, an individual consultant, or an SEO consulting firm. A qualified, experienced SEO expert reviews your site; asks about your business goals and target … Avital Web, Los Angeles SEO Company, is Now Offering SEO Reseller Plans Internet and Websites : Guaranteed SEO Services with Proven Strategies Offered … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Top 10 Things to Look for in an SEO Expert – CIO
Jan 23rd
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Top 10 Things to Look for in an SEO Expert
CIO Whether your business is small or large–or somewhere in between–if you rely on Web traffic for sales or marketing, you need to either master search engine optimization (SEO) or you need to hire an SEO specialist. SEO experts from SEO Moz, … Avital Web, Los Angeles SEO Company, is Now Offering SEO Reseller Plans |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO experts look to fresh content to boost search engine rankings – Castleford Media (blog)
Jan 22nd
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SEO experts look to fresh content to boost search engine rankings
Castleford Media (blog) It seems that more and more SEO experts are adapting to Google algorithm changes made by realising the potential of unique content. In Business2Community (January 22) industry commentator Chad Pollitt said that the online landscape was constantly … Copywriting – the new SEO? Why SEOs are Finding Themselves Reporting to Content Marketing |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Next, Digital Mall Kiosks Will Look at You, Guess Your Age, Show You Clothes
Jan 12th
One of the most influential retail technologies of the last quarter-century has been digital signage – the use of video to show crisp, bright full-motion advertising, more recently incorporating multitouch interaction. At the National Retail Federation Conference in New York City next week, Microsoft will present a full demonstration of use cases for its Kinect for Windows motion capture system – which uses the technology that first premiered for Xbox 360 – in tailoring live ads directed to shoppers as they walk past window displays and items for sale.
Software being developed for Windows Embedded POSReady 7 will be shown ascertaining live data about the people they scan – including their estimated gender, height, weight, ethnicity, and age – and produce live ads tailored and targeted directly to the estimated demographic. And as the technology’s product manager told ReadWriteWeb today, business intelligence and analytics functions networked to those systems will enable advertising managers to literally change and create campaigns for those live shoppers on-the-fly.
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“Imagine you’re in a mall and you’re walking by various stores,” begins Windows Embedded director of product management John Doyle. “But in one of the stores, you see a digital sign integrated into the front window of the store. It’s showing content about what’s in the store and it attracts your interest. As you walk towards the digital sign, it recognizes you because it’s using Kinect. We have integrated Microsoft Kinect with the digital sign, and it recognizes the individual.”
On the back end of this operation is software co-developed with consumer engagement services provider Razorfish, that utilizes to estimate your personal characteristics using the data gleaned from the Kinect-gathered image. This software, as Microsoft will show at NRF, should make a disarmingly accurate estimate of your age.
“Automatically, the digital sign – because of its ability to connect to the back end and process that information – can immediately change the content that is being viewed on the digital sign,” continues Doyle. This way, a store billboard truly can market to youngsters, first by ascertaining that there are youngsters standing in front of it.
Perhaps a high-end department store on the order of Nordstrom, Doyle suggested, could tailor suggestions for such things as outdoor gear, dresses, and accessories based on the real-time data that the Kinect camera gleans from the shopper staring at its digital sign. It might not even be out of the question for software to estimate the shopper’s tastes in fashion based upon what she’s wearing at the time.
Video of Microsoft’s CES 2012 demonstration of a shopper trying on clothes without changing her own. Posted to YouTube by shopping services provider Retrevo.com.
At CES 2012 this week, Microsoft showed select customers the portion of next week’s NRF demonstration that features the virtual clothes-changing program. Here, a shopper sees herself in digital outfits that are superimposed on the camera image of herself, which is shown in reverse in order to simulate a mirror. The shopper may make gestures to interact with “charms” (as Microsoft now calls function icons, beginning with Windows 
along the top that change the function of the program.
At this point, the functionality is a little crude. Actually, it’s a bit like dressing up a member of The Sims. Simulated clothes, while three-dimensional, are stiff and appear self-illuminated, which may not necessarily lend itself to the most flattering presentation. But you can see where Microsoft is going with this. You can imagine a more evolved form of this prototype using a physics engine to approximate the weight and the shimmer of the fabric, as well as apply the same lighting characteristics as are used in the room, so that dresses don’t look like they’re being held up with garden wire.
If you were wondering how Microsoft would leverage the shopper’s personal copy of Windows or Windows Phone into the mix, here it comes: If the user has a Windows Phone, the Windows Embedded kiosk may be able to send snapshots and other data about the interaction to that phone. Conceivably – although Doyle acknowledges there are already multiple privacy issues involved – the kiosk could glean more information about the shopper via near-field communication.
A lot of this assumes that the kiosk software gets it right. Can the software really guess your age, for instance? If a human being guessed the shopper’s gender wrong, it would probably lead to a no-sale. Doyle responded that the display software might not have to make the right call all the time. It only applies its estimate during the attraction phase, when it’s trying to get the shopper to come closer. You don’t blame a store today for showing you signage featuring kids clothes even though you’re not a kid.
As these kiosks interact with customers nationwide, Microsoft’s Doyle projects a setup where data gleaned from those interactions may be mined in real time by business intelligence software on the back end. Franchise managers could ascertain which items are hot and which are not. And in cases where kiosks are previewing items that are still being sewn in the factories, those managers could make inventory decisions at that point about how many to order. Real-time interest data could be mapped and compared according to a franchise’s various regions and coverage zones.
Doyle admits this setup could give shoppers in California and elsewhere on the West Coast a certain advantage. Live ad campaigns could be deployed first on the East Coast, and tailored for maximum attractiveness and efficiency as the sun passes over the Central and Mountain time zones. “In a single slice of a day, you could optimize that business intelligence, from East Coast to West Coast, very, very quickly,” he remarks.
Though Microsoft’s CES demo involved ordinary HDTV displays, the NRF demo could utilize a new display concept from technology partner Intel, announced just yesterday, featuring a 7-foot, 6-inch-tall multitouch glass screen.
The NRF Expo will be held at the Javits Center in New York beginning next Monday, January 16. Microsoft will be distributing its display over booths 1337, 1334, 1239, 1238, and 983.
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A Look Back at the Evolution of SEO in 2011 – Search Engine People (blog)
Dec 30th
 Independent Online |
A Look Back at the Evolution of SEO in 2011
Search Engine People (blog) SEO has certainly had its share of ups and downs this past year. Both Google and Bing have rolled out a lot of new features and algorithm updates that have the potential to impact the way SEO is handled from here on out. … Kingpin SEO Webmaster news Year-end review for 2011 – Part two Google, Facebook top US web brands in 2011 |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Quora Launches Visual Boards That Look Like Delicious’ Stacks
Dec 19th
Today the Q&A site Quora announced the debut of boards, which function a lot like stacks do on social bookmarking site, Delicious. Boards organize information around a specific topic, making it simpler for users to follow related content. You can collect similar questions that are already up on Quora and grab links from outside the sites. Considering that Quora is all about questions, why would it choose to go this route?
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In a blog post, Quora said that it decided to introduce boards when it realized that people were more interested in finding the most interesting and informative answers written by other users. They weren’t actually using the site for what it was intended, which was asking questions and writing answers. Boards function as another way to organize this type of content, rather than clustering on question-and-answer boards. To create a Quora board, go to “create board” (you can make as many as you want), then post the board. You can also follow other boards.
Similarly, on the new Delicious you create stacks organized around specific interests, and then you can follow other stacks.
The goal of Delicious’ redesign was to appeal to more mainstream users. Quora writes that its new goal “reflects the broader system we are evolving into: to connect you with everything you want to know about.”
As both Quora and Delicious organize around interests rather than questions-and-answers or keywords, both of these sites transform into visually focused topic-specific channels, which look a lot like StumbleUpon’s redesign. It’s true that the social Web has become too cluttered. But is this the best way to organize it?
Are Quora and Delicious doing it wrong? Or is this just how the social Web is evolving? Tell us what you think in the comments.
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The New Delicious UI Updates Make It Look Just Like Pinterest
Dec 15th
Ever since its redesign, Delicious has starting looking more like mainstream social bookmarking site Pinterest. The latest Delicious UI overhaul applies the same visually focused look to the link saving page, which was operating under the “old” look until just today. The new design is focused on visuals and stacks, whereas the old version was more about tags and recommended tags. Is it bad that Delicious is trying to copy Pinterest’s look?
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Pinterest is a fast-growing, visually focused social bookmarking site that grabs mainstream social networking users. CEO Ben Silbermann, the West Des Moines native, says that the first people to understand and use the site were women in Des Moines, Minneapolis, Houston and, later, Chicago.
In fact, AdAge spoke with Shannon King, GM of digital for Real Simple magazine, who said that Pinterest has referred “more traffic to the site than even Facebook.”
Where does that leave Delicious? Trying to figure out who its new core audience is post re-design, especially since tech geeks are pretty much over it.
In an attempt to make stacks more visually appealing, Delicious has staggered them to look just like Pinterest’s.
YouTube Co-Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen bought Delicious from Yahoo earlier this year with plans to make it more appealing to mainstream users.
Will the latest Delicious overhaul officially push it, and social bookmarking, mainstream?
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Hands-On With the New Spotify Radio: Look Out, Pandora
Dec 9th
Normally when a tech company launches a product or feature that’s billed as a potential “killer” of a popular incumbent, there’s cause to be skeptical. Quite often, that’s just unsubstantiated hype either on the part of the company itself or tech writers.
In the case of Spotify’s new Web radio feature, we’re not going to go so far as to say that it’s a “Pandora killer,” but its inclusion in Spotify’s desktop client is going to give the up-and-coming streaming service a tangible advantage over the 11-year-old Web radio service.
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Music recommendation engines can be a tricky nut to crack. Last.fm combines your listening history with that of many other people, and it does a pretty good job of relating songs and artists to one another. Pandora uses a more complex algorithm based on specific musical qualities such as tempo, tonality and even things as granular as the level of distortion applied to the lead guitar. The Echo Nest, which has a much bigger data set and powers dozens of music apps, uses an even more automated approach involving data-mining, acoustic analysis and machine learning.
The recommendations offered up by Spotify Radio are not quite as good as those on Last.fm or Pandora in many cases, but they’re pretty solid and the feature has serious potential. We started stations based on a handful of artists across genres and time periods and found the results to be mostly appropriate without being too broad or overly obvious. We even tried a handful lesser known artists from a few decades ago and Spotify was able to rattle off sonically similar tracks.
The feature definitely has its limitations. For one, that stations based on an individual songs (rather than artists) seem limited. Those channels appear to operate as though you’d selected the artist, not the song. By contrast, when you put a specific track into Pandora, it looks for songs with similar aural qualities regardless of genre, time period or other broad characteristics. It does a pretty effective job of pairing up songs that actually sound similar. And if you don’t agree, you can always hit the thumbs down button.
The experience certainly varies depending on what you enter. While many stations returned appropriate-sounding results, a station for the band Nirvana mostly brought up other well-known rock songs from the same era, including a slow, cheesy ballad by Aerosmith.
Spotify hasn’t divulged what’s fueling their recommendations, but it does feel pretty similar to results from The Echo Nest, which powers a number of music apps, including Clear Channel’s Pandora cline, iHeartRadio. Whatever’s behind it, it has some growing to do before it’s a thoroughly viable alternative to Pandora. Still, the mere addition of such a feature to Spotify will make many users that much less prone to load up Pandora.
Spotify Radio is just the latest way users of the streaming service can discover new music. The company recently unveiled a platform for third party apps, included editorially curated selections from Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, as well as more automated recommendations from Last.fm. The app platform and the new radio feature will both be rolled out shortly to desktop users, but you can download a preview here.
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